29 June 2012

The "Dracula" in question is a species of orchid. These two photos are of the Ecuadorian Dracula simia. For additional pix, including one of the European "monkey orchid," see the link at Why Evolution is True.

A Norwegian man has received terrorist training from al-Qaida's
offshoot in Yemen and is awaiting orders to carry out an attack on the
West, officials from three European security agencies told The
Associated Press on Monday.

Western intelligence officials have long feared such a scenario — a
convert to Islam who is trained in terrorist methods and can blend in
easily in Europe and the United States, traveling without visa
restrictions.

Officials from three European security agencies confirmed Monday the
man is "operational," meaning he has completed his training and is about
to receive a target...

Next step: curtailment of the civil liberties of persons with white skin; this will complement the profiling currently underway on persons of color, and pretty much complete the dermatologic spectrum.

And the reason they release this broadly vague information to the public at large? So that all of us will not only now become suspicioius of all white people, but we will also understand why we are being asked to submit quietly to authority.

This is truly impressive. To dislodge a seal from an ice floe, they don't bump into the floe (at the risk of even a minor injury to themselves), but rather create a wave that accomplishes the end result. And they do so in perfect synchronicity. How do they learn when to dive in order to maximize the wave crest? Wow.

A stray dog has completed a 1700km journey across China after joining a cycle race from Sichuan province to Tibet.

The dog, nicknamed "Xiaosa", joined the cyclists after one of them gave him food. He ran with them for 24 days, covering up to 60km a day, and climbing 12 mountains.

And he has those short little legs!

Addendum/amendment/clarification: A tip of the hat to Nolandda, who found a report here indicating that while the dog "accompanied" the cyclists on their journey, it did not run the entire distance; they built a cage to carry her on portions of the trip (and in fact some of the cyclists took the bus when the road was too steep).

These two "photobooth" photos of JFK and Jackie seem to show the president with a laterally-deviated left eye. A quick search this morning reveals a number of casual references to JFK having had a "lazy eye" (exotropia).

A story in the New York Times details an alternative solution to caring for an infirm elderly parent.

They ordered a MEDCottage — a prefabricated 12-by-24-foot bedroom-bathroom-kitchenette unit that can be set up as a free-standing structure in their backyard. It’s more than a miniature house — it’s decked out with high-tech monitoring and safety features that rival those of many nursing homes...

The cottage is laid out as an open-plan apartment with a kitchen area (equipped with a microwave, small refrigerator and washer-dryer combo), a bed area and a bathroom large enough in which to maneuver a wheelchair. The utilities and plumbing connect to the primary residence.

It's very expensive, but so is nursing home care:

The cottage costs about $85,000 new; Mr. Dupin’s distributors will buy it back for about $38,000 after 24 months of use. “If you compare it to nursing home costs, which can run $6,000 to $8,000 per month in Virginia, even higher in New York, that’s cheap,” said Mr. Dupin.

Of course, unlike nursing homes, granny pods don’t come equipped with 24-hour professional care and three meals a day. Hiring a health care aide (around $19 an hour) just during weekdays can easily add another $39,000 per year.
But a growing number of elderly people — 88 percent of those over 65 — say they want to live in their own homes, in their own communities, as they age.

Last week I was looking in my "Things To Do" folder and encountered a book review from the Atlantic that I had tucked away 18 years ago:

Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, by Ben Macintyre (1992).
The intrepid Macintyre took a boat trip into the Paraguayan jungle in
1991 in search of the surviving inhabitants of Nueva Germania—an
abortive "Aryan" colony founded in the late nineteenth century by the
ghastly Elisabeth Nietzsche, racist sister of the philosopher. He found a
weird village of unreconstructed white supremacists—inbred, half mad,
many of them still speaking a kind of zombie German—and heard some
curious and frightening stories about Josef Mengele. A true-life Heart of Darkness.

It sounded fascinating at the time, and still does, so yesterday I obtained the book from the library. If you've read it, please feel free to comment.

And yes, my TTD folder does have items 18 years old. Sigh...

Addendum: Hat tips to Hero for Hire and to Bub for leading me to this related video from Vice:
Vice link.

You're looking at a photo of Queen Elizabeth shaking hands with a former commander of the Irish Republican Army ("Mr McGuinness was a senior member of the IRA when it killed the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten in a bomb blast in 1979.) Via.

When first the gods lie mounted on a tray
Life's word among the humanist reply.
This order ends the fruitless Roman way
See towns through peace, man's chosen alibi.On frail death comes the lurid pageant-shows:
Some trail cut and a rustic honeybee,
The pleasing county dwarf, a brittle hose;
The one that learned should miss eternity.That then was hailed The Perilous Frontier
While modest strangers name the newborn four
Will hopes on that regard today pass near?
Felled converts want the humorist Al Gore.Transport the blood and educate this chum
The motions granted to the faceless bum.

And:

Dream on while students go into the fray
The shallow pen our immigrants defy.
The new-found milder terrorists sashay
To now abuse one charming, speechless Thai.Afraid, these contemplate our highs and lows:
This balance-tried secure autonomy,
Truth-leaning ways, the fabled porticoes;
So time and tune shield art there honestly.With haunted hope, if lethal traitors sneer
Where rows of streamlined tungsten men abhor
Do roadway portals splash that engineer?
The term's wrong value told the final score.I touch clasped hands to batter on the drum
Tied fast on those the celebrants go mum.

Apart from the fact that there are an OCTILLION (10^27)of these, the even more remarkable fact is that all of them are anagrams of one another.

Despite claims in the 1890s that Mars was filled with canals teeming
with water*, research over the past several decades has suggested that in
fact, Mars has only a tiny amount of water, mostly near its surface.
Then, during the 1970s, as part of NASA’s Mariner space orbiter program,
dry river beds and canyons on Mars were discovered—the first
indications that surface water may have once existed there. The Viking
program subsequently found enormous river valleys on the planet, and in
2003 it was announced that the Mars Odyssey spacecraft had actually
detected minute quantities of liquid water on and just below the
surface, which was later confirmed by the Phoenix lander.

Now, according to an article published [June 21] in the journal Geology,
there is evidence that Mars is home to vast reservoirs of water in its
interior as well. The finding has weighty implications for our
understanding of the geology of Mars, for hopes that the planet may have
at some point in the past been home to extraterrestrial life and for
the long-term prospects of human colonization there.

Surprisingly, the evidence used to reach this conclusion comes from analysis of "the amount of water molecules locked inside crystals of the mineral apatite" in meteorites that originated from Mars. Discussion at the link.

* Can something "teem" with water?(And "amount of water molecules" is also awkward. Better copyediting needed).

It's been many years since I fished in Minnesota, so on a recent visit to the North Shore and north central part of the state I was bemused to see this sign at Leech Lake (a huge lake (>100,000 acres) with lots of muskies; according to the DNR "Muskie anglers averaged 1 fish/31 angler-hours, during the 2011 fishing season.")

But note, if you catch a musky and it's less than four feet long, you have to release it.

26 June 2012

Fatme
Kichukova has her make-up applied during her wedding ceremony in the
village of Ribnovo, in the Rhodope Mountains on December 11, 2011. The
remote mountain village of Ribnovo in southwest Bulgaria has kept its
traditional winter marriage ceremony alive despite decades of Communist
persecution, followed by poverty that forced many men to seek work
abroad. The wedding ritual was resurrected with vigor among the Pomaks
-- Slavs who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule. The highlight of the
ceremony is the painting of the bride's face, where in a private rite
open only to female in-laws, her face is covered in thick, chalky white
paint and decorated with colorful sequins. Muslims currently make up 10
percent of Bulgaria's 7.4 million population. (Stoyan Nenov/Reuters).

This unexpected and intuitively unexpected correlation has been reported in the May 2011 issue of J. Allerg. Clin. Immunol. Here are some excerpts from the abstract:

In 2009, we reported a novel form of delayed anaphylaxis to red meat, which is
related to serum IgE antibodies to the oligosaccharide galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal). Most of these patients had tolerated meat for many years previously. The implication is that some exposure in adult life had stimulated the production of these IgE antibodies.... Prospective studies on IgE antibodies in three subjects following tick bites showed an
increase in IgE to alpha-gal of twenty-fold or greater...

The results presented here provide evidence that tick bites are a cause, or possibly
the only cause, of IgE specific for alpha-gal in this area of the United States. Both the number of
subjects becoming sensitized and the titer of IgE antibodies to alpha-gal are striking. Here we
report the first example of a response to an ectoparasite giving rise to an important form of food
allergy.

And from the discussion:

This evidence includes following the response prospectively in three cases, a strong
correlation with histories of tick bites, epidemiological evidence that these antibodies are not
found in regions where tick bites are rare, and the correlation with IgE antibodies...

Our original observation was that the distribution of anaphylactic reactions to cetuximab was similar to the maximum prevalence of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The major vectors of RMSF in this region are the ticks D. variabilis and A. americanum, and
the geographic range of A. americanum has been expanding over the last 30 years, probably
in parallel with the massive increase in the deer population...

Although
many different patterns of tick bites have been reported, three forms stand out:

1. A few bites from adult ticks that persist for weeks or months, remaining pruritic.
The most severe case of this kind reported having two tick bites removed surgically
6 months after the original contact.

2. Repeated bites often around the ankles in subjects who work outside or hunt
regularly. In a few cases, the local reactions to the ticks have been so severe as to
preclude further work outside.

3. Multiple bites from larval ticks, generally 10 or more, but often hundreds, which
are again severely pruritic, but generally do not last more than a few weeks...

Fascinating. I would never have expected this. For those interested, here is the distribution map of documented cases:

Via the discussion thread at Reddit, where some readers report their personal experiences with meat anaphylaxis and discuss methods of tick removal.

Remember the photo of the potash mining ponds? Here's a similar process occurring naturally in a lake in Senegal, where high levels of salt support the growth of a halophilic extremophile (Dunaliella salina) which produces a red pigment, turning the salty water pink.

We are no longer speaking Old English or Latin, with their single-word
infinitives... Ænglisc-speakers could not have
said "to boldly go", since the infinitive was a single word, "gān".
They'd have had to say "gān bealde", or something like that. Similarly,
Latin speakers wouldn't have had the option: they'd have had to say "ire
audacter". (Forgive the probably awful Latin and Old English there.)
But we're not speaking Latin or Ænglisc, so it's just silly to limit
ourselves to the grammatical options available to them...

There are times when splitting is not just permissible but obligatory... If the quantity you are measuring more than doubles, where do you put
your infinitive? ... [instead of]
"to more than double", what would you suggest? "We expect it more than
to double" or "We expect it to double more than"? The first is weird;
the second is even weirder.

A photoessay at English Russia makes note of the longstanding project at Perm to interbreed wolves and domestic dogs.

Attempts to cross dogs and wolves have been made since the time of the
Ancient Rome. And only the project of the Perm wolf-dogs can be called
successful... It started 13 years ago when Vyacheslav at his own risk and for his own
money bought a two-years-old wolf Naida from the man who had been going
to stuff her... The professor had been looking for a partner for Naida for 4 years. Eventually it became a male German shepherd... The hybrids were stronger, of greater endurance, they rarely fell ill
and had an incredible scent. For example they can find a trace three
days old while for ordinary dogs 6-8 hours is a limit. They live 25-30 years, the wolf-dogs are easily trainable [the Wikipedia entry on wolves as working animals disputes the latter assertion]...Many of them already serve in the police, army: in Chechnya, Gelendzhik, Samara, Ural cities…

Archaeologists excavating an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Cambridgeshire say the discovery of a woman buried with a cow is a "genuinely bizarre" find...

At first it was thought the animal skeleton was a horse.
Student Jake Nuttall said: "Male warriors might be buried with horses, but a woman and a cow is new to us."
Co-director of the excavation, Dr Duncan Sayer, from the University of Central Lancashire, said: "Animal burials are extremely rare, anyway.

"There are only 31 horse burials in Britain and they are all with men. This is the first animal to be discovered with a woman from this period - the late 5th Century - and it's really interesting that it's a cow, a symbol of economic and domestic wealth and power...

"The cow burial is unique in Europe which makes this an incredibly exciting and important find.

The widest rapid (817 feet/249 meters) and waterfall in Europe, located on the Venta River in Kuldiga, Latvia. I also found this video (narrated in Latvian), which documents some of the history of salmon fishing at the site:

I was reminded of this Nonsequitur comic strip last night when I watched the excellent movie Margin Call -

The film received positive reviews from critics, garnering an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The New Yorker described the film as "easily the best Wall Street movie ever made."
Although the film does not depict any real Wall Street firm, or similar corporate action during the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs similarly moved early to hedge and reduce its position in mortgage-backed securities, at the urging of two employees. Other firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns found themselves similarly and catastrophically over-leveraged in mortgage-backed securities. They scrambled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to manage the financial and public panic that ensued when their problems became apparent and the global financial markets plunged as a result. The character John Tuld (Irons) is loosely based upon Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers.

- which probably wasn't noticed much by the general public because it doesn't have any explosions or special effects. It does have consistently excellent acting (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci et al), and was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

“Saudia Arabia really runs the oil market ... and the Saudis right
now have several reasons for essentially overproducing, or producing
more than the market needs, and pushing prices down,” said Verleger.

I filled up yesterday at $3.36, down about 15% from $3.90 back in March. If it continues, it will boost the economy by freeing up money for discretionary spending. And it would be good news for someone's re-election bid...

24 June 2012

If there is one 2012 movie that seems to have a lock on a best
picture nomination, it is "Beasts of the Southern Wild." And if there is
a single reason its early viewers have loved it so much, it is an
8-year-old girl named Quvenzhané Wallis, who was six when she filmed it.
Here is a case of a great role finding the perfect actress to play it.

"My computer has trouble pronouncing names," I told Quvenzhané not long ago in my living room.

"That's okay," she said. We worked together on a phonetic spelling: kwa van je nay. A beautiful name for this composed young woman, who deserves her own Oscar nomination, and whose nickname is Nazie.

The film is the feature debut of Benh Zeitlin, whose first short
subject was made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It's set in The
Bathtub, an isolated island area offshore from New Orleans, where the
poorest of the poor scramble to survive. Shanties perch on stilts in the
delta marshlands. A boat is made from the bed of a pickup truck. The
world of prosperity could be on a distant planet. We focus on a girl
named Hushpuppy, whose mother has disappeared, whose father is loving
but sometimes harsh, and whose determination is indomitable. The feeling
is post-apocalyptic, and there are rumors of another storm on the way,
one that will flood the islands and their people.

"Beasts" opens on July 6, but is already famous in film circles. At
Sundance 2012, it won the Grand Jury Prize. At Cannes, it won the Camera
d'Or as best first film. At both, the small girl from Louisiana won
hearts with her spunky, straightforward manner in the face of calamity.

Mass media news outlets understandably filter out or suppress the worst aspects of war. Most well-informed people are aware of the ongoing strife in Syria, but it's hard to appreciate the degree of atrocities without graphic images.

I found some photos today. Most of you will probably be best advised not to view them.

Iconic Photos presents an image of the front page of the May 30 issue of The Times, which displayed one picture of a dead child with descriptive text; I have sequestered the text beneath the fold because it is very graphic:

Vampire pumpkins and watermelons are a folk legend from the Balkans, in southeastern Europe, described by ethnologist Tatomir Vukanović. The story is associated with the Roma people of the region, from whom much of traditional vampire folklore, among other unusual legends, originated.

The belief in vampire fruit is similar to the belief that any inanimate object left outside during the night of a full moon will become a vampire. According to tradition, watermelons or any kind of pumpkin kept more than ten days or after Christmas will become a vampire, rolling around on the ground and growling to pester the living. People have little fear of the vampire pumpkins and melons because of the creatures' lack of teeth. One of the main indications that a pumpkin or melon is about to undergo a vampiric transformation (or has just completed one) is said to be the appearance of a drop of blood on its skin.

Photo credit ("I bought the melon at the Raleigh, North Carolina farmers' market
and set it on the counter in an air-conditioned kitchen for four days,
achieving the results photographed here. Upon observing the phenomenon, I
wouldn't doubt that less scientific people supposed the watermelon had
some relation to vampires.)

Probably everyone is familiar with the risk of floodwaters lifting or pushing a vehicle when the vehicle enters deep water, but a different danger (and one new to me) was made evident during this past week's floods in Duluth.

As the city received a summer's worth of rain - nine inches - in one storm, the water cascaded down hillsides and roads, running beneath the pavement to undermine the support for the asphalt. So even where there's not an visible washout or pothole, driving can be hazardous.

This is significant because it would indicate not just transatlantic contact with North America, but migration or mating in the preColumbian era.

Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be
traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia,
one may have a more distant origin. This lineage belongs to haplogroup
C1, one of a handful that was involved in the settlement of the Americas
around 14,000 years ago. Contrary to an initial assumption that
this lineage was a recent arrival, preliminary genealogical analyses
revealed that the C1 lineage was present in the Icelandic mtDNA pool at
least 300 years ago. This raised the intriguing possibility
that the Icelandic C1 lineage could be traced to Viking voyages to the
Americas that commenced in the 10th century...

If the Greenland and ancient European hypotheses are rejected, what
we have is a woman who entered the Icelandic society from an extinct
lineage of Native Americans, probably from the northeast (or perhaps her
Greenland Norse mother was of this line). What the Norse would have
termed Markland. It is tempting to point to the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows
in Newfoundland. Perhaps the Europeans had enslaved a native woman, and
taken her back to their homeland when they decamped? But more likely to
me is the probability that the Norse brought back more than lumber from
Markland, since their voyages spanned centuries.

Medics at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami said the 3ft (90cm)
projectile entered his brain over his right eye and went out the back of
his head... He was shot with the projectile as he swam in a lake near his Miami area
home on 8 June when his friend set off the trigger of a spear gun he
was loading.

According to the Bible, as calculated in the August 1972 issue of Applied Optics:

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed from
available data. Our authority is the Bible: Isaiah 30:26 reads, Moreover
the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of
the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days. Thus
Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as the Earth does from
the Sun and in addition seven times seven (forty-nine) times as much as
the Earth does from the Sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive
from the Moon is a ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the Sun,
so we can ignore that.

With these data we can compute the temperature
of Heaven: The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point
where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by
radiation. In other words, Heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the
Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth-power law for
radiation
where E is the absolute temperature of the Earth: 300K. This gives H as 798K absolute (525°C).

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed but it must be less
than 444.6°C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulfur changes from a
liquid to a gas. Revelations 21:8: But the fearful and unbelieving … shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.
A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be below the
boiling point, which is 444.6°C. (Above that point it would be a vapor,
not a lake.)

It's not clear to me whether Isaiah chapter 30 is describing Heaven or "Zion at Jerusalem" - fulltext of the chapter here.

Conservators have discovered a four-inch gold hairpin that once belonged to Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henry II and Queen of France from 1547 until his death in 1559, in a communal latrine at Fontainebleau Palace. Archaeologists were excavating the Henry IV courtyard at the royal palace outside of Paris in preparation for an upcoming restoration project when they found the precious object.

The pin is identifiable as Catherine’s because it is decorated with a pair of interlocking C’s that look exactly like the Chanel logo but are actually her monogram from when she was Dauphine of France, i.e., married to the heir presumptive, between 1536 and 1547. When Fontainebleau Palace conservator Vincent Droguet cleaned the encrusted grime off the jewel, he noticed the remnants of a white and green finish in the monogram area. White and green were Catherine’s colors...

How it got there is and will doubtless remain a mystery. She had a royal commode of her own and it’s highly unlikely she would have used a communal latrine even under the direst of excretory pressure. Droguet surmises that the pin was either stolen by or given away to someone who then lost it or dropped it in the toilet.

It's been over a month since I've visited sites I normally see every week, so today I found two Dilberts - the one above on the psychodynamics of the office, and the one below commenting on American foreign policy...

22 June 2012

Two years ago and again early this year I posted photos of color polymorphism (an alba variant) in this butterfly. Now I can finally present the full life cycle.

I found the eggs on common vetch growing in our back garden and brought them inside to keep in a small plastic container on my desk. At first I wasn't sure what species they were, and even when the small green caterpillars hatched I couldn't quite tell. As they approached full size (top photo), I was pretty sure it was the common Clouded Sulphur. Most people are familiar with this butterfly, though perhaps not by name, because it is common and widespread (because it's able to utilize a variety of common legumes as hosts for the larvae).

Yesterday I posted images of the caterpillar forming a "J" (left) and then transforming into a chrysalis (right):

One particularly nice feature of raising butterflies at home is being able to watch the buttefly develop inside the chrysalis. Here's the Monarch inside its now-transparent chrysalis:

It's truly beautiful, and watching it pop out and then inflate those wings is just magical.

So - here's the Clouded Sulphur inside its chrysalis several days before it hatched:

The head is at the top, with the wings folded over the thorax - exhibiting a beautiful pastel palette of colors.

And here (s)he is on the day of eclosion, holding onto a twig while the wings dry and become stiff enough for flight (double click for wallpaper size). How can you not love those big green eyes?

Most butterflies prefer to keep their wings folded vertically when they are at rest; my guess is that this allows them to lift off more quickly if startled or attacked. I couldn't get a photo of the dorsum of these wings, but you can see examples here.

The World Geography has assembled a list of the nine largest (by area) countries that do not have a mountain. That sent me scrambling to find a definition of a mountain:

There is no universally accepted definition of a mountain. Elevation,
volume, relief, steepness, spacing and continuity have been used as
criteria for defining a mountain. In the Oxford English Dictionary
a mountain is defined as "a natural elevation of the earth surface
rising more or less abruptly from the surrounding level and attaining an
altitude which, relatively to the adjacent elevation, is impressive or
notable."

So, which are the largest countries without a "mountain?" Ponder your answer before peeking below the fold. The one I guessed came out #5 on their list.

At 7 a.m. on January 20, 2007,
DEA agents battered down the door to Thomas and Rosalie Avina’s
mobile home in Seeley, California, in search of suspected
drug trafficker Louis Alvarez. Thomas Avina met the agents in
his living room and told them they were making a mistake. Shouting
“Don’t you fucking move,” the agents forced Thomas Avina to the
floor at gunpoint, and handcuffed him and his wife, who had been
lying on a couch in the living room. As the officers made their way
to the back of the house, where the Avina’s 11-year-old and
14-year-old daughters were sleeping, Rosalie Avina screamed, “Don’t
hurt my babies. Don’t hurt my babies.”

The agents entered the 14-year-old girl’s room first, shouting
“Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl, who was lying on her
bed, rolled onto the floor, where the agents handcuffed her. Next
they went to the 11-year-old’s room. The girl was sleeping. Agents
woke her up by shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The
girl’s eyes shot open, but she was, according to her own testimony,
“frozen in fear.” So the agents dragged her onto the floor. While
one agent handcuffed her, another held a gun to her head.

The Ninth Circuit Court has ruled that putting a loaded gun to an 11-year-old girl's head was not proper:

While the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals defended
the agents' rough treatment of Thomas and Rosalie, it also declared
that yanking the Avina children off their beds and putting guns to
their heads did, in fact, constitute the “intentional infliction of
emotional distress.”

The ultrasound image shows the nasopharyngeal teratoma as a "bubble" protruding in front of the lip of the fetus.

The tumor was resected
at the base using a 600 micrometer contact YAG laser fiber on continuous
mode with 10 W of energy. A minimal amount of bleeding from the base of
the tumor was controlled with a noncontact YAG laser fiber. The tumor
fell inside the amniotic cavity, where it was left. The procedure lasted
68 minutes. There were no maternal or fetal complications.

Six weeks ago I modified the settings of TYWKIWDBI to eliminate the annoying "word verification" step for comment submission. Since then I have been deluged with spam - maybe 15/day just for "payday loans" alone.

I wish I could have Elisha unleash a she-bear on the spammers, but lacking that option, I've put captchas back on the comments. Sorry, but cleaning the comments was wasting too much of my time.

21 June 2012

At our house, the term "cat" is used both for the four representatives of felis domesticus and as a verbal shorthand for "caterpillars," so I've misapplied the old phrase "cat's cradle" to title this post about the chrysalis of a Clouded Sulfur butterfly (Colias philodice).

One of the things that fascinate me regarding butterflies is the process of metamorphosis. The transformation takes days, and during this time the caterpillar has to secure itself somewhere. Some, like the Monarch, glue themselves to a surface and hang vertically:

- and the Clouded Sulfur "proceed to anchor themselves with a silk attachement at the base and a
remarkable silk strand enclosing the upper thoracic region, so that the
pupa is suspended like a mountain climber hanging from a cliffside in a
sleeping bag."

I have never been lucky enough to see this while it was happening, so I don't know how it manages to spin the silk around its body like that.

I also think it's very cool that the completed chrysalis (second photo from the top) has the shape and color of a leaf of the vetch on which it was created, helping to camouflage it during the time the larva is so utterly defenseless.

We report a case of oral stings by spermatophores of the squid Todarodes
pacificus . A 63-yr-old Korean woman experienced severe pain in her
oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along
with its internal organs. She did not swallow the portion, but spat it
out immediately. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation
in the oral cavity. Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like
organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva
were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa. On the basis
of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign
bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.

Each spermatophore includes an ejaculatory apparatus, which can expel
the sperm mass quite forcefully, and a cement body for attachment... In order not to leave calamari connoisseurs unduly freaked out, I should
clarify two points. First, most Western squid preparations remove the
internal organs and serve only the muscle, so there's no danger of
accidentally ingesting spermatophores. Second, it's perfectly fine to
handle spermatophores--just don't put them in your mouth.

From a report published in Nature Communications and excerpted at Live Science:

Stem cells can remain alive in human corpses for at least 17 days after death... The researchers only had access to remains 17 days old, suggesting they have not yet seen the limits that stem cells can reach...

The cadavers in question had been kept at 39 degrees F (4 degrees C) to
keep from rotting. The stem cells the researchers isolated give rise to
skeletal muscle... Apparently the stem cells were able survive in the total absence of oxygen.

These stem cells in both dead mice and human corpses were dormant when
discovered, with extraordinarily reduced metabolic activity, marking the
first time scientists have found that stem cells were capable of such
dormancy. The researchers suspect that chemicals given off after death,
or the low levels of oxygen or nutrients in corpses, or a combination
of all these factors, could have sent the stem cells into dormancy,
helping them survive for weeks.

This is the now-famous video of students on a school bus verbally tormenting the older lady who was the bus monitor. One of the students filmed the harassment and uploaded it to YouTube to show the world how cool they were.

Her name is Karen, and she has been a widow for 17 years, has lived in
the same town she grew up in and is about to have her 50th high school
reunion in the same school district, and deserves so much better than
the actions shown by those in this video. Let's figure out ways to show
her that there are still good people out there...

I couldn't watch more than two minutes of the ten-minute video. Here's a summary, courtesy of Salon:

Over the course of 10 stomach-churning minutes, a group of students from
Greece Athena Middle School verbally harass the 68-year-old Klein in a
harrowing display of mob cruelty. It goes on and on and on, as the kids
on Bus No. 784 call her a “troll,” an “elephant” and a “fucking fatass”
with “ugly-ass ears.” When Klein tells them “Unless you don’t have
something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” a boy responds, “Why
don’t you shut the fuck up?” When they goad her about the tears running
down her face and she says, “I’m crying,” one of them replies, “Yeah,
you’re probably missing your box of Twinkies.” They poke and prod her,
and at one point a kid says, “If I stabbed you in the stomach, my knife
would go through you like butter.” Appallingly, one of the boys told her
that she’s so ugly, her kids should commit suicide. What he didn’t know
was that Klein’s son really did kill himself 10 years ago. And
throughout it all, her tormenters just laugh and laugh at their own
cruelty, egging each other on.

Warning: it's even worse than the girl-scout-cookie-thieves video in making you want to wreak violence on the kids on the bus.

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!”He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

An average human... can perceive a
million different colors... Our powers of color
vision derive from cells in our eyes called cones,
three types in all, each triggered by different wavelengths of light.
Every moment our eyes are open, those three flavors of cone fire off
messages to the brain. The brain then combines the signals to produce
the sensation we call color...

Each cone confers the ability to distinguish around a hundred shades, so
the total number of combinations is at least 1003, or a
million. Take one cone away—go from being what scientists call a
trichromat to a dichromat—and the number of possible combinations drops a
factor of 100, to 10,000. Almost all other mammals, including dogs and
New World monkeys, are dichromats. The richness of the world we see is
rivaled only by that of birds and some insects, which also perceive the
ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

Researchers suspect, though, that some people see even more. Living
among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of
colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called
tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue
fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no
names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal
experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what
we consider the limits of human vision.

19 June 2012

This body of work consists of three simple materials that, when
combined, produce the portraits: a wooden panel painted a solid white,
thousands of small galvanized nails, and a single, unbroken, common
sewing thread.

To see a detailed close-up photo, click the link provided in AM's comment (below).

She also created a second set of images by taking "regular denim material" and "removing part of the weave."

A compilation of clips from videos filmed by Russian dashboard cameras. The reason for the popularity of dash-cams is explained at Animal New York:

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges.
Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian
courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people
to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video
proof...

Two-way insurance coverage is very expensive and almost completely
unavailable for vehicles over ten years old–the drivers can only get
basic liability. Get into a minor or major accident and expect the other
party to lie to the police or better yet, flee after rear-ending you.
Since your insurance won’t pay unless the offender is found and sued,
you’ll see dash-cam videos of post hit and run pursuits for plate
numbers...

And sometimes drivers back up or bump their pre-dented car into yours...

And then, sometimes, someone will jump under your car at a crossing,
laying on the asphalt, simulating a badly hurt pedestrian waiting for
that cop conveniently parked nearby. This dramatic extortion scheme was
common, until the Age of the Dash-cam...

Watching this makes me think about the benefits of having a dash-cam. I wonder how they work - do they "loop" the recording, and then you click to save the last couple minutes?

Last week, a press release from Chicago’s Office of the Mayor proclaimed... a plan to get rid of the city’s “excess asphalt.”

It
wasn’t a proposal for a big new park or recreational facility, but a
plan to take little bits of public space here and there — streets,
parking spots, alleyways — and turn them into places for people. It was
the latest example of a municipal government taking an active role in
tactical urbanism, that low-cost, low-commitment, incremental approach
to city building — the “let’s not build a stadium” strategy.

For
a long time, tactical urbanism was associated with guerrilla gardeners
and fly-by-night pop-up parks, whereas large-scale “city planning” was
seen as the job of bureaucrats with blueprints. But more and more often,
City Hall is taking a more active (as opposed to purely reactive) role in these types of smaller, cheaper, localized efforts, and sometimes even leading them...

Today, cities have less money but more ways to communicate, two
conditions perfectly suited to more focused, low-cost planning. Now you
can home in on a specific neighborhood (or even just a few blocks), find
out what the residents there want or need, cheaply implement it on a
trial basis, and make it permanent if it works...

New York and San Francisco were early adopters, but Ethan Kent, vice
president of the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces (PPS), says that
until recently, such efforts existed as “a cool trend, but not the
paradigm shift” that’s now transforming official policy...

“This isn’t just hanging flower baskets. It’s enabling communities to showcase their identity in the public realm.”

A photograph by Kathy Keatley Garvey captures a honeybee's sting, with its abdominal tissue trailing behind.

UC Davis communications specialist Kathy Keatley Garvey in the
Department of Entomology said she has taken at least 1 million photos of
honeybees in her lifetime, but this snapshot won the first-place gold
feature photo award in an Association for Communication Excellence
competition...

The images showed the progression of the sting, but the most
interesting part was that the bee's abdominal tissue lingered behind,
she said. "As far as I know, nobody's been able to record anything
like this," Garvey said. She said the only time she's seen it
illustrated was in a textbook.

Source (wait for it)... The Sacramento... Bee (link now dead). Relevant information and additional photos in the sequence at the photographer's post at Bug Squad.

Via BoingBoing, where I found this interesting observation in a comment:

Their stingers developed for defending their hives by stinging the rigid
bodies of other bees and insects, not for stinging the stretchy skin of
mammals. One bee can sting another bee/insect several times.

After filling in the forms and putting the object into a FedEx
envelope, MAUREEN walks to counter and presents the object for
processing.FEDEX GUY spins package around, examines label, frowns.FEDEX GUY: I can’t send this.MAUREEN stares, waiting for further explanation. When none is
forthcoming, she spins the package back around and looks at the label,
because apparently she is going to have to figure out what it is that
she didn’t put on it. Because it’s not just a delivery service-it’s a
TEST OF WITS. Finding no blank spaces, she feels like a bit of a FedEx
failure.MAUREEN: Why?FEDEX:(very disapproving look) I can’t send this to a random house.MAUREEN: What?FEDEX: I can’t send this to a random house. You need an address.Now MAUREEN gets it. She can barely believe this wonderful thing is happening, but she gets it.MAUREEN: Oh! No, no. It’s a publisher.FEDEX: Yeah, but I can’t send it.MAUREEN: Why?FEDEX: I can’t send to a random house.MAUREEN: No, I mean, it’s a business. It has an address.MAUREEN points to the address on the label, under Random House, person to be delivered to, number, street, city, and zip code.FEDEX:(in a “you need to listen to me now” tone) I can’t send to a random house.MAUREEN: No, it’s called Random House. But it’s a publisher. A business. That’s its name.FEDEX: I can’t …MAUREEN taps furiously on address.FEDEX GUY examines package for a minute.FEDEX: You can’t send stuff like this.MAUREEN: THAT’S ITS NAME. It is CALLED Random House, but it is not a random house. It is a business at that address.FEDEX: But you can’t have random house in the “send to” line.MAUREEN: I HAVE TO. THAT’S WHERE IT IS GOING.FEDEX GUY knows that he has said “you can’t send to a random
house” about six times now and knows repeating it will not help. Looks
at Maureen like she is very, very stupid...

18 June 2012

I found several eggs on leaves of borage plants in our garden and didn't know what butterfly had laid them. Borage is a common weed, and is used by a wide variety of butterflies as a food plant for their caterpillars. I kept the leaves in a jar, and after a while some small black caterpillars emerged. began eating voraciously, and grew much larger.

They look ferocious, but were no problem to raise except for their copious, wet, messy frass that required frequent cleaning and changing of the container (other caterpillars, like the Polyphemus silkmoth ones, excrete dry little pellets that resemble pepper grains and are easy to clean up after).

When they were full size, the caterpillars climbed to the lid on the jar, hung in a "J" shape, and proceeded to undergo that remarkable metamorphosis that is endlessly fascinating to me - the formation of a chyrsalis.

I didn't know how long the conversion to a butterfly would take. With Monarchs, it's easy to tell by looking at the outside of the chrysalis when the butterfly is ready inside; with these it was more difficult. But all one has to do is wait...

... and voila! One morning, there she is, wings hanging down. By the time I found her she had pumped the fluid into the wings, which were fully inflated but not yet dried. She was docile and not ready to fly, so she readily transferred to my finger for a portrait:

The pattern is quite beautiful and intricate close-up (much harder to appreciate in the field when she tends to be a blur of activity, but easier here where you can enlarge the image with a click). She is closely related to the American Lady (whose life-cycle I documented two summers ago) and looks rather similar top-side, but on the underwings this Painted Lady has four eyespots on the hindwing, while the American Lady has two larger ones.

Painted Ladies are very common in the United States, and with Monarchs are probably the two butterflies most often raised in classrooms by small children. Kits are available from Carolina Biological Supply and other sources; these contain food in the form of a sort of agar, which is all the caterpillars need for nutrition, so you don't have to scour the wilds of your neighborhood looking for food plants. Raising them is a pleasant diversion for small children. And for some adults.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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